Hexed (14 page)

Lucifer was going to say that his particular brand of confidence was about to get him tossed into a well, but before she could speak, the Keeper of Secrets held up a slender finger to her lips, bidding silence. Lucifer felt gravity shift again when she saw the malevolent joy dancing in the woman's eyes.

“Hey,” the man said, snapping his fingers in Lucifer's face. “I asked you a question. Are you going to say something or just scowl at me all day?”

The Keeper of Secrets placed her elegant hand on his shoulder then bent down and whispered in his ear. “She isn't scowling at
you
, darling,” Her voice was soft, but a tremendous weight coiled beneath it, ready to strike.

When the man turned and saw her, all the color drained from his face. “I . . . I thought she was the Keeper of Secrets,” he said, pointing at Lucifer with a shaky finger.

“Oh, no, darling. At least, not yet.”

“Uh, not
ever
.”

“Wait your turn, Lucifer.” She straightened herself and smiled down at the man. “Hello, Karl. I am the Keeper of Secrets, but most people simply call me the Harlot. I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting. Follow me. I've prepared some tea.” Without another word, the Harlot turned and walked away, the deep folds of her black dress billowing in a breeze only it could feel.

The man, Karl, stood unmoving as Lucifer stepped past him. She followed the Harlot to the far side of the sitting room where a tea set waited on a warped mahogany coffee table. The Harlot motioned to a faded red couch as she took her place in a high-backed velvet chair.

“He might be a while. You take some time getting used to,” Lucifer said.

“He'll find his courage soon enough.” The Harlot smiled as she picked up the teapot and began to pour. “And I'm sorry about your shoes.”

“My shoes?”

At that moment, Karl came in. He stood next to Lucifer but didn't sit. “I don't like being made to wait.” He looked down and scowled at Lucifer. “Or being made a fool of.”

“You also don't like deep water, snails, or people with differing opinions,” the Harlot said. “And no one likes being made a fool of, darling. You aren't special in that regard.” She blew across her cup, cooling her tea. “Or in any other, if I must be honest.”

“Excuse me? I cut million-dollar deals before this one even gets out of bed in the morning,” he said, thumbing toward Lucifer.

“I doubt that,” said Lucifer. “I don't sleep much.”

“If I wanted comments from the slacker generation, I'd start a YouTube channel. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

The Harlot put the cup down and waved toward Lucifer. “How rude of me. Karl, may I introduce Lucifer. My heir.”

“Lucifer? You're the devil?”

Lucifer leveled her best sneer at the Harlot. “You just
love
doing that, don't you?”

“Lucifer is a thief, not a devil. And she is rather proud of her name. It's a celebration of the two women who gave their lives to save hers.” Then the Harlot leveled a sneer of her own. “What a shame she doesn't extend that courtesy to all the women who have saved her life.”

Lucifer scratched at the mark on her shoulder and frowned.

“I don't care about her,” Karl said. “I want to know if we're in business. My offer is three percent.”

“Three percent!” The Harlot put her hand to her chest in a show of feigned delight. “Oh, Karl. You are confused about the nature of the services I provide. I sell secrets, but you do not dictate the price of those secrets. I do.”

“Now hold on just a minute, harlot, whore, whatever you are—”

The Harlot was out of the chair faster than Lucifer's eyes could follow. She had knocked the coffee table aside and had Karl by the throat so quickly that the teapot had already shattered on the floor before Lucifer could put her arms up to protect herself.

“Lucifer is not the only one who is sensitive about her name,” she said as Karl ineffectually clawed at her wrist, trying to free himself. “I am not a harlot. I am
the
Harlot. And if you refer to me as a whore again, I will sew your face into a coin purse.” She leaned in, her nose almost touching his. “While you watch.”

The Harlot tossed Karl to the ground like a discarded tissue. He landed with a heavy splat, right in the middle of the spreading puddle of water soaking into the carpet. Steam rose around him as he rubbed his throat and gasped for air.

Lucifer herself had been on the business end of the Harlot's wrath before and couldn't help but feel an odd twinge of sympathy for Karl. But she also knew that if the Harlot followed through on her threat, Karl was getting off easy. The Keeper of Secrets was quite capable of doing worse than creative haberdashery. Much, much worse.

“Your overbearing machismo has grown tiresome, Karl. So let us conduct our
business
and be done.”

Karl stood, his clothes dripping. When he spoke, his fragile voice was barely more than a whisper. “How much?”

“This is a day of sad educations for you, Karl. You discover that your time has no more value than the time of others, that the only person impressed by your boardroom antics is yourself, and, what I'm sure will come as a rather confusing surprise to a parasitic leech such as yourself, that I have absolutely no use for money. I daresay, you are in a rather weak negotiating position.”

Karl swallowed, grimacing in pain. “If you don't want money, then what do you want?”

The Harlot settled back into her chair, the black fog of her dress billowing over the arms in graceful waves. “I want your fondest childhood memory,” she said.

“I don't understand. You want me to tell you what my favorite memory is?”

“No. Not tell me.
Give
me. Offer it to me as payment for the secrets you wish to know, and I will pluck it from your mind. But understand, Karl. It will never come back to you. It will cease to exist. Even if you were to write it down, it would be as if you were reading someone else's words. They will have no meaning for you. That memory will be lost. Forever.”

Lucifer watched Karl's face twist in confusion, but she understood perfectly well. The Keeper of Secrets didn't want money. She wanted things that were precious to you. Sometimes it was as simple as a family heirloom. Other times she wanted your kidney or the last five minutes of your life. Whatever it was that she wanted, no matter how mundane, it was something you were going to miss. Whether you realized it or not.

“So, that's it? You'll tell me the secrets I want to know, and all I have to give you is my favorite memory?”

“Your favorite
childhood
memory, darling. You can keep that debaucherous evening in Lisbon.”

Karl straightened himself and extended his hand. “You have a deal.”

The Harlot rose from her chair and glided forward. She stared at his hand for a moment before speaking. “There is no going back, Karl. Are you sure this is what you want?” She asked with absolutely no malice in her voice.

“I can make new memories.”

“Very well.” But instead of shaking Karl's hand, the Harlot quickly wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. He struggled uselessly against her grip. The fabric of her dress danced around them, circling them in slow, undulating waves. Her wild hair snaked forward and inched across his face like the roots of a dying tree desperately searching for water. Karl couldn't move. Only his wide, unblinking eyes indicated that he was aware, alive.

The Harlot held him there, savoring the embrace until Karl's eyes began to flutter and close. Slowly, her hair fell back into the chaotic curls around her own head, and her dress succumbed once again to its peculiar laws of gravity. She lowered him to the ground and stepped away once he was able to stand on his own.

Karl shook his head and blinked his eyes. “What did you do to me?”

The Harlot smiled. “What I told you I was going to do. I took your favorite childhood memory.” The Harlot swooned. “And oh, what a delicious memory it is!”

Karl slapped his face a couple of times like he was trying to keep himself awake. “All right, so you got what you want. My turn.”

The Harlot walked toward a nearby fireplace that Lucifer couldn't remember being there, let alone having a fire burning inside. She pulled a yellowed parchment from the mantel and tossed it into the fire. Green flame immediately erupted from the parchment as it caught fire. Before it could be completely consumed, the Harlot pulled the parchment from the fire and extinguished the flame with a quick puff of air.

“Here,” she said, handing the scorched paper to Karl. “I believe this will satisfy your curiosity.”

As Karl studied the blackened images on the page, his eyes widened. “This is . . . thank you, Harlot. Thank you.” Karl kept mumbling “thank you” over and over again as he stared at the paper, meandering his way back toward the hall of mirrors.

Once he was gone, Lucifer asked, “Well?”

“Well, what, darling?”

“What was the memory?”

The Harlot took Lucifer's arm and guided her down an adjacent hallway. “It was the one and only moment in his life when his father told him he was proud of him.”

“Oh,” Lucifer said. “That actually makes me kind of sad for him.”

“Don't be. He was fifteen years old and had just beaten up a younger boy for having the misfortune of wearing pink to school. Neither Karl nor his father are terribly likable human beings.”

“And now Karl's going to be a rich, unlikeable human being.”

“Richer, actually. But his newfound fortune won't last long. Men like Karl are saddled with insecurity. They're always trying to live up to some cartoonish idea of masculinity in order to impress the people around them. Especially their fathers. But without this memory to temper that desire, his greed will run unchecked. By month's end, he will be ruined and throw himself out of an office window.”

The Harlot looked down at Lucifer and gave her arm an affectionate pat. “Just like you're going to do.”

CHAPTER 14

“I'm not going to kill myself!”

The Harlot looked down at Lucifer while escorting her past dozens of inhuman trophy skulls mounted to the walls. “Yes, Lucifer, you are,” she said, more as a command than a basic statement of fact. “But that wasn't what I was referring to.”

“Okay, don't do that,” Lucifer said.

“Do what, darling?”

“You know damn well what!” Lucifer pulled her arm free. “Don't pull that fortune-teller crap with me! I hate when you do that. Things don't always happen the way you say they will.”

“I didn't mean to upset you. But I will not insult you by lying. You
will
toss yourself from a building window. You
will
kill yourself. Your coming here has all but ensured it.”

Lucifer imagined her own skull on the wall next to the others. Would the Harlot ever stop to admire it, or would it become just another forgotten decoration? “You would never let that happen,” Lucifer said, more in an attempt to convince herself than the Harlot.

“You are my heir,” the Harlot said with finality. “Not even death will free you from that obligation.”

The Harlot led Lucifer through a vaulted archway adorned with intricate sculptures of fairies and imps carved into the ancient wood. The faeries rose along the left side of the arch while the imps clawed their way up the right until they clashed at the top of the arch in a writhing mass of twisted claws and paper-thin wings.

Past the archway was a cavernous dark that seemed to grow deeper the harder Lucifer tried to peer into it. It was impossible to see anything beyond just a few feet in front of her, but Lucifer could feel the vastness beyond, as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff on a moonless night. The Harlot pulled on a golden rope hanging down a nearby wall. Curtains the size of swimming pools parted to reveal a massive window that filled the room with the Aether's golden light.

They were in the Library of Secrets. Bookshelves hundreds of feet high stretched out into the darkness beyond what the light could penetrate. Several winged creatures dropped from their perch atop one of the great shelves and glided deeper into the dark recesses of the library.

The Harlot moved toward a wide circle of wooden pedestals in the center of a large reading area. Each pedestal displayed an open book of varying size, all bound in ancient leather, which, thankfully, wasn't human as far as Lucifer could tell. The biggest book was the size of a car door and bound with brass rivets, while the smallest could have fit in the palm of Lucifer's hand.

“You've been busy,” the Harlot said, casually paging through one of the more reasonably sized volumes.

“Yeah, well, I'm trying to save a girl's life.”

“I was speaking of that, darling,” the Harlot said, pointing to the floor.

Lucifer looked down and saw what the Harlot was referring to. In the center of the circle, a series of inlaid tiles several shades darker than the surrounding marble floor formed a huge symbol that was almost impossible to make out. But Lucifer didn't need to climb to a higher vantage point to know what it was. It was the same symbol tattooed on her shoulder: the strange lowercase “h.”

Lucifer scratched her shoulder. “Don't worry. No one knows how to remove it.”

“Because it
can't
be removed. Did you honestly think, after all I went through to mark you as my heir, that I would allow it to be so easily undone?”

“I'll find a way to get rid of it.” Lucifer didn't try to hide the venom in her voice. “Someday, I'll get rid of this tattoo and be done with you.”

“No, Lucifer. You won't.”

The Harlot turned and stared out the window. Beyond the soiled glass, the blasted wasteland of the Aether rolled out to the misshapen horizon. Wilted trees rose from the blackened soil, their branches splintered and twisted at unnatural angles. The red and orange hues smeared across the sky were clotted with gray and yellow clouds that hovered like bad moods waiting to vomit their anger onto the parched earth below.